"No, no, Hodge shall not be shot"

Plus VS Pritchett, global copper shortages, Luigi Mangione and Sylvia Plath

Hello,

My column this week was on the new film of the Robert Harris thriller Conclave and the virtues of doubt. My last Substack post was on the best books I read in 2024.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson

I spent Christmas re-reading James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I found a second hand copy in the very good Oxfam bookshop near Angel station and bought it on a whim. I’d forgotten quite how ridiculously enjoyable it is. I don’t think any classic of English literature is as instantly rewarding. I opened it a random page one evening, meaning to flick through it but ended up reading for hours. This is a manner of reading of which Dr Johnson would have approved:

[Johnson] said that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to … He added, ‘what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read … He said, ‘if a man begins to read in the middle of a book and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may, perhaps, not feel again the inclination’.

In fact, when I finished it, I went straight back to the beginning. The book is unlike a modern biography in that Boswell spends very little time sketching out the details of Johnson’s childhood or conscientiously accounting for all of his subject’s tedious movements and motivations. Most of it is dedicated to relating witty or profound things Johnson said. Which means the ratio of pleasure per page is very high. Johnson is one of the great lovable characters in literature: gruff, epigrammatic and compulsively argumentative. He is an indirect descendant of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and in my mind a kind of cross between Christopher Hitchens and Winston Churchill (in fact I suppose both of those men were probably being self-consciously Johnsonian in their public personas). Most of the book consists of Boswell following Johnson around London as he argues with celebrity egotists like Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick. Johnson almost always wins. Structurally it’s a bit like a sit-com. Every chapter he sallies forth afresh to puncture somebody else’s pretensions. The effect is incredibly funny and oddly modern. It’s one of the few classic books (along with Pepys’s diaries, Montaigne’s Essays and the novels of Jane Austen) that can begin to persuade you that people in the past were just like us. For instance, why is this so funny and endearing?

I shall never forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat … I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr Johnson’s breast apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this'; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, 'but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed’.

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat and said, ‘But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’

What makes the book so enjoyable and likeable is that you take pleasure not just in how witty Johnson is but how amusing Boswell finds him. An important part of a sense of humour is not merely the capacity to be funny but to find things funny. Much of Boswell’s genius is in the fact that it even occurred to him to record fragments of Johnsonian bluntness and absurdity that a lesser writer would hardly have thought noting. This made me laugh:

Talking of a man who was grown very fat, so as to be incommoded with corpulency; he said ‘He eats too much, Sir’.

Portrait of Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

Other things

I’ve been reading some VS Pritchett short stories, inspired by these great essays by Martin Amis and James Wood. It’s worth getting hold of a copy of Pritchett’s Selected Stories. This is the copy I have. My favourite is ‘The Sailor’ which is a little masterpiece of psychological penetration. The prudish and cautious narrator adopts an obsessively tidy ex-sailor as a kind of live-in servant. The story is extremely subtle about the ways that we make ourselves feel comfortable by imagining that other people are like us and share our own limitations and motivations. By doing this, the narrator totally misunderstands the character of his strange servant. There is a full textbook’s worth of human understanding in these few pages.

The Substacker Gurwinder is justly famous as the author of these very good essays on the intellectual obesity crisis and the mechanics of audience capture. Luigi Mangione, who is accused of shooting the UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, subscribed to Gurwinder’s newsletter and paid for a private Zoom call with him. Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about it here.

Tom McTague is very interesting about Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson on the Unherd podcast. He interestingly points out that Farage is much, much better on social media than Jonhnson, who thrived in an older, more establishment media landscape. Interestingly, Trump is a master of both TV and Twitter. But perhaps that’s because American television was always much closer to the chaotic, confrontational tone and atmosphere of social media than our own rather sedate Have I Got News For You.

Ed Conway is fascinating here on how much copper we need for electrical wires and what an epic operation it is to get copper out of the earth. We (well certainly, I) barely think about copper extraction. It’s one of those unbelievably massive things going on in the background of our civilisation (like international shipping etc) that you just never see. But it’s not hard to imagine that for a future society, one of the defining marks of our culture might be our huge open cast copper mines.

Poem of the Week

Parliament Hill Fields is one of my favourite Sylvia Plath poems. It’s about a miscarriage but I - probably foolishly - always associate with New Year because of its opening line. In fact it could be set any time in January. It captures a kind of emotional rawness and bleakness that is connected to the rawness and bleakness of January. And especially, I can’t help feeling, January in London. What stunning descriptive writing this is:

Gulls have threaded the river's mud bed back
To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid. The wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints

From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim; the city melts like sugar.

That metaphor about the gulls settling and stirring like blown paper or the hands of an invalid might be one of the best Plath ever wrote. You can read the full poem here.